


The Theory of Acquired Characters

by toomuchplor



Series: Theories [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: undermistletoe, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-06
Updated: 2006-12-06
Packaged: 2017-10-20 04:23:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toomuchplor/pseuds/toomuchplor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU, (loosely) based on <i>Never Been Kissed</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Theory of Acquired Characters

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to tamalinn, droolfangrrl, and sparktastic for cheerleading, and HUGE thanks to beeej for the idea from which this sprouted. I also owe a debt to my Biology 336 class. You'll see. This fic grew completely out of proportion with my intentions! Gah!

Rodney trips over his untied shoelace, staggers two steps forward, and finds himself kneeling on the pavement with his palms burning and his forehead bumping up against a pair of denim-clad knees.

“Ouch,” says the person belonging to the knees. “Well, that looked awkward.”

Rodney takes a moment to gather his dignity before drawing himself upright. He tries to rise to his feet in a loose-limbed youthful way, but the act is somewhat impaired by the loud popping sounds released by his knees. “Just, ah,” he improvises, snapping his jacket into place, “just wasn’t paying attention.”

Through the haze of embarrassment, Rodney is barely able to note anything but the vaguest details of the man in front of him. He gets an impression of an amused smirk, slender hips, and a t-shirt that says “Cheese’s Crust Pizza - in crust we trust!”. “In a hurry?” asks the man, raising one eyebrow.

“No, no, no,” says Rodney dismissively, waving one hand, then abruptly recovers from his attack of Canadianism. “Well, yes. Actually.”

“Then allow me to get out of your way,” says the other man, and steps aside. “Before you do some serious damage to the sidewalk.”

“I’m just -- I wonder if you could tell me how to find, uh,” Rodney says, consulting his spiral-bound notebook, “lecture hall C.”

“You’re not an undergrad,” says the man, and it’s clearly not a question. Rodney decides to blame his popping knee joints for this.

“The map says it’s facing the north quad, and this is the north quad, and I’m already 10 minutes late,” says Rodney, waving his folded campus map around. “So could you cut the liberal arts smirking superior ‘I majored in the school of life’ crap already?”

“This is the south quad,” says the man. “You want to head”--

“North, I’m guessing?” says Rodney, about to push past the man.

“Well, south first, get to the West Boulevard path, then around the Architecture wing and loop through the Library complex.” Rodney must show his despair on his face, because suddenly the man’s tucking his books under his arm and waving Rodney to his side as they cross the quad. It’s only then, with casual sidelong glances, that Rodney comes to the realization that he recognizes his companion from somewhere.

“Rod Ingram,” offers Rodney, awkwardly snaking a hand across and attempting a firm clasp.

“John Sheppard,” answers the dark-haired man, and that confirms Rodney’s suspicions: somehow he’s literally stumbled over the very person he came here to see.

* * *

While they walk, Rodney cobbles together a story about how he’s a grad student from Vancouver who’s been required, by the dictates of the draconian graduate studies dean, to audit several undergraduate courses before he can focus on his master’s degree. It rankles, even though it’s a ruse, for Rodney to play at being a mere master’s student, but (he reminds himself) it’s all for a good cause. And though Sheppard may think that Rodney’s a bit long in the tooth to be pursuing his first graduate degree, he refrains from showing it.

“What about you?” asks Rodney, pulling nervously at the straps of his backpack. It’s been years since he had anything but a laptop bag slung over his shoulders and his back isn’t sure how to handle the even weight settled across his frame. “What are you, post-doc?”

“I teach,” says Sheppard, annoyingly modest.

“God, you don’t teach one of my courses, do you?” Rodney asks, making his eyes go wide with alarm. If nothing else, this assignment is giving his long-neglected dramatic talents a good airing. “Please tell me you’re not teaching one of my courses.”

Sheppard lists off the three classes he’s got this semester and Rodney makes the proper show of moaning and flailing when they discover that Sheppard is indeed teaching Rodney, in a senior seminar on evolutionary genetics.

“I put the notes on the web,” says Sheppard, by way of consolation, “so really, you don’t have to show up for lectures.”

“You just, you go around telling people that?” Rodney asks, thinking of the sections of Physics 302 he tormented during his days as a sessional instructor while completing his second PhD. Even though he’d fervently wished for all of his students to drop out of his section, or just fail to show up, he’d terrified them so much that they slunk into the lab every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at precisely eight in the morning. They even took turns bringing Rodney his coffee -- not that it’d spared any of them when it came to the final. By contrast, Sheppard seems worryingly lax. “Well, I suppose it is genetics,” Rodney muses to himself, and is surprised when Sheppard snorts.

“Not so far away from the liberal arts,” he pretends to agree, then stops abruptly. “Lecture Hall C,” Sheppard announces, and tilts his chin towards a nearby turtle-shaped building.

“Guess I’ll see you at two o’clock,” Rodney says, feeling inexplicably dumbstruck. He’s not used to making small talk, especially not with vintage tee-wearing, smirking, spiky-haired zoologists. “You know. In class.”

“If you decide to come,” adds Sheppard. “See you there.” He walks away without even nodding goodbye.

* * *

Rodney finds a place in the front row at 1:53 p.m. and spends the next few minutes laying out all the accoutrements of good note-taking: spiral notebook, four-color retractable pen, highlighter, and day-timer. It’s been years since Rodney took notes on anything other than a yellow legal pad, and then it’s mostly been a series of half-drawn schematics interspersed with block capital messages to himself -- things like: “TRY ROUTING WFS FLOW THROUGH CAPACITOR”, and “UPDATE WILL BEFORE RETURN TO A.”, and “BUY CAT FOOD.” He’d forgotten all about the weird thrill of facing a whole field of knowledge, the seeming neatness of a subject before you’ve had time to figure out all the ways everyone is wrong, the prospect of a semester’s worth of colour-coded notes and the tantalizing potential to master a new area of knowledge.

Then again, Rodney realizes as he watches the other students file in, being the top of the class had felt a lot more impressive when he was five years shy of the mean age instead of a good fifteen years over. His classmates all look like sixth graders compared to him.

Rodney hunches over his notebook a little protectively, not wanting anyone to see how he’s already written the date, course name, lecture number, and his own (fake) name across the top of the page. It’s not out of shame, he decides; it’s because all of these infants haven’t got the faintest clue on how to succeed in academia, and he’s not about to hand the tools to them on a silver platter. His secretiveness just happens to resemble shame, that’s all.

He blames this poor posture for the fact that it’s 1:59 and thirty seconds before he becomes aware that he seems to be the only representative of the Y chromosome in the entire room.

“Is this women’s studies or something?” Rodney asks of a neighbour. She shoots him an annoyed glance and whispers to her friend. “Because,” Rodney continues, abruptly ill at ease, “I thought it was an evolutionary genetics seminar.”

“It is,” says Sheppard, who has appeared in the room with only seconds to spare. “Okay, everyone come and get a syllabus,” he announces in a slightly louder voice, and the women (girls, really) flock forward in droves. Rodney rolls his eyes, waiting for the dust to settle, and is gratified when Sheppard steps over and hands him a syllabus personally. Rodney tries not to read too much into the way Sheppard’s fingers brush his during the transfer. All the estrogen in the air is clearly addling his brain.

“Notes are on the web,” Sheppard says quietly to Rodney as he hands him the paper.

“My printer’s broken,” answers Rodney. He means for it to sound sincere and innocent, but somehow he’s too busy noticing that Sheppard’s eyes seem to be two colors at the same time, and he comes off sounding like a blatant liar. Sheppard half-smiles, looks away, and then smiles again before returning to the front of the room. Rodney realizes with numb surprise that Sheppard thinks Rodney is flirting with him. Which is an utter disaster, because Rodney’s got a mandate here, flirting with John Sheppard is really not part of the plan.

Though, Rodney thinks, clicking his pen to black ink and methodically noting down Sheppard’s office hours, it might not be a bad place to start.

* * *

He encounters the first difficulty in the next thirty seconds, when Sheppard proceeds to make a neat and concise disclaimer to any creationists in the room. “This course is about the study of evolution,” he says, one hip resting on the counter behind him. “And as such, it presupposes that all this evolution theory stuff is a fair and accurate model of how the diversity on this planet might have arisen. A reasonable body of fossil evidence as well as more recent empirical data can support this theory.”

As though embarrassed by the sudden flow of actual scientific language that’s escaped him, Sheppard clears his throat and continues in a more drawling manner. “I’m not going to say evolution is true, because science doesn’t ever say something’s true: things can only be disproven, never definitively, you know, proven. So if any of you are creationists, you should know that a lot of what we’re going to talk about might mess with your beliefs. But we’re not out to change what you think is true: that’s about faith, not about science.”

Rodney snorts. The girl next to him glares.

“As for what I believe,” says Sheppard, ignoring Rodney, “well.” He clicks on the overhead projector and slides a transparency across the surface. “I’m a Pastafarian.”

Rodney clicks his pen to the black ink (for diagrams) and automatically copies the picture, which is of a jellyfish-like googly-eyed creature. It’s inane, but it’s the only thing keeping him from launching into a lengthy rant that would completely blow his cover and out him as a real scientist, not some starry-eyed master’s student.

“So, let’s start,” says Sheppard. “Unless anyone wanted to ask me something?”

Rodney folds one forearm over the other, forcing down the almost uncontrollable urge to raise his hand and tell everyone present just how retarded creationism is, and how the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster debacle only goes to prove how completely ridiculous and abstract the biological sciences are, how any self-respecting person would never enter a field where a tenured professor could open a lecture by pretending to tell his students that everything they’re about to learn could be completely false.

“Anyone?” says Sheppard, who can obviously sense that Rodney’s about to explode. “No questions?”

Rodney squeezes his eyes shut tight and thinks of Atlantis.

“All right, then,” says Sheppard. “We’ll begin with a quick overview of punctuated equilibrium.”

* * *

Rodney hangs back after the lecture just long enough to realize that Sheppard’s one of those annoyingly charismatic lecturers who attract worshipful students like bees to honey. Rodney can barely see Sheppard through the throng of admirers and since he can’t formulate any questions that don’t begin with the words “How can you possibly believe,” or “Since you’ve obviously wasted your life in genetics,” or “No, seriously, were you dropped as a child?”, Rodney decides that he will wait until office hours to begin his campaign. He heads for the door.

It takes him a moment to realize that Sheppard’s calling for him through the press of bodies. Much as he’s always wanted to be called ‘Rod’, no one’s ever tried it before and it’s disconcerting to hear himself addressed by his first name anyway. Usually in an academic environment, it’s ‘Dr. McKay’, or at the very least, ‘sir.’

“Yes?” Rodney asks, turning back and feeling a traitorous flush rise into his face. He can feel the eyes of all of Sheppard’s sycophants on him, so he allows himself a smug chin lift.

“I was wondering if we could have a word,” says Sheppard. “Could you wait a minute?”

Rodney half-nods, trying not to seem too flattered by this attention even though the urge to gloat is rising thick and heady. He hops up on the lab table to wait. Obviously Sheppard’s been overcome by his charms.

Sheppard sees the last chattering smiling girl to the door personally, pulling on the knob until it snicks shut. The patient smile drops off his face instantly; when he turns back towards Rodney, he looks merely exhausted. “I got three chili peppers from my Bio 336 section last semester,” he says flatly, like this is some sort of explanation. Seeing Rodney’s blank stare, he elaborates. “RateMyProfessor.com? It means I’m supposed to be --”

“Hot,” supplies Rodney, catching on. “Well, that explains the thong brigade.”

“Yeah,” says Sheppard miserably, sticking one hand in his hair and sighing. “I hate undergrads.”

“Tell me about it,” Rodney says, world-weary, then freezes when he realizes that he’s just made a slip. He hopes desperately for a moment that Sheppard hasn’t caught it, but when he looks up, it’s to a narrow-eyed gaze of contemplation and Rodney knows that he’s piqued Sheppard’s curiosity. “Um, you wanted to talk to me?” Rodney tries, a little panicked.

Sheppard crosses his arms over his chest and tilts his head. “Rod Ingram, master’s student in -- what was it again?”

“Botany,” says Rodney, though the very sound of the word pains him.

“Studying what exactly, in your thesis work?”

“Ribosomal RNA,” Rodney grates out. God, he can’t believe he let Parrish decide on his alibi.

“Interesting field,” says Sheppard without a trace of irony.

“Fascinating, really,” deadpans Rodney, though just saying the words is stripping his will to live. “You, uh. Wanted to talk about my thesis?”

“Nah,” says Sheppard, pulling the Flying Spaghetti Monster off the overhead and tucking it carefully inside a manila folder. “I just wanted to --“ he pauses, making a scrunched-up face, “--request,” he continues, with a pointed emphasis on the word, “that you try to stop rolling your eyes and fidgeting during my lectures. It’s distracting to the other students.”

Rodney has never bit the inside of his cheek so hard. He’s tasting blood, but most importantly, he’s not making any of the cutting remarks that keep surfacing in his brain. He swallows hard and manages, “My apologies, Dr. Sheppard.”

“Please,” says Sheppard, waving a hand and pulling his bag’s strap over his head so it’s hanging crosswise over his chest. “Call me John.”

“No,” declines Rodney. “Thanks, but -- no. You shouldn’t --” He can’t quite imagine it: he’d started demanding that everyone call him ‘Doctor’ the day of his first dissertation defense. Yet here’s John Sheppard, double PhD., a leader in his field, and he’s asking some nervous rookie botanist to call him by his first name. Rodney can’t decide if he’s more amused or appalled.

“I’m not big on titles,” says Sheppard, lifting one shoulder. Between the bohemian canvas satchel on his hip and the punny t-shirt, Rodney realizes, Sheppard’s actually doing a much better job of passing for a dumb kid than Rodney himself. “Anyway, like I said, earlier. Notes are on the web. If I were you, I’d make use of them. This course will be a cake walk for you.”

* * *

“I need some back-up,” Rodney tells Weir on the phone that night. “I’m not blending in. I don’t know why you thought I would, I’ve never been one to fade into the background, and he’s never going to buy my story unless I can make it more believable.”

“Dr. McKay,” Elizabeth interjects reassuringly. “I understand. I’ll send someone.”

“Someone young,” says Rodney. “Someone who looks like a real grad student.” He taps the phone base nervously with his fingers. “Do you know where you can buy canvas shoulder bags?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. When Elizabeth speaks again, she sounds concerned. “I’ll have someone for you tomorrow.”

* * *

It turns out that Elizabeth is just terminally incapable of deciding who is able to go undercover and who isn’t.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Rodney groans.

“Why are you carrying that ugly bag?” asks Ronon, poking at the canvas satchel Rodney finally found last night in a trendy chain store named something appalling like “American Navy”.

“Dear god, did they seriously put you in denim? Please tell me I’m having some sort of second-hand hallucinogenic drug reaction. Is someone on this quad smoking mushrooms?” Rodney looks around frantically, but everyone seems to be either hurrying from one lecture to another or chugging the battery acid the campus food services call coffee.

“Weir said you needed my help,” says Ronon, and looks around as if to try and see what Rodney’s seeing. “Hey, where are they all getting those round cakes from?” he asks, pointing at a passerby munching on a glazed donut.

From this, Rodney concludes that Ronon really is here in the south quad, because only Ronon greets every new planet as nothing but a chance to forage for more food.

Ronon’s extracted a crumpled five from his pocket and is squinting at it, looking exactly like the caveman he is at heart. “How many cakes will this get me?”

“This is never going to work,” Rodney moans. “God, what a nightmare.”

* * *

Except, against all laws of nature, it really does work.

Rodney expects that having Ronon at his side will garner nothing but stares and maybe even outright pointing, but he’s shocked to discover that no one even gives the Neanderthal a second glance. He’s forced to spend their lunch break studying Ronon’s appearance and contrasting it with those of the students around them. Weir’s got Ronon decked out in worn dark jeans, a striped wrinkled button-down shirt, and a khaki jacket. His hair is its usual dreadlocked mess, but that’s hardly an unusual style here on campus. He’s clearly at ease (he’s always at ease with a plate of food in front of him) and Rodney bought salad wraps for lunch, so even his utensil-free eating habits aren’t noteworthy.

Rodney looks down at his own ensemble (corduroys, his scuffed Doc Martens from circa 1992, and a t-shirt that says STFU University) and decides that, yes, Ronon actually does make him marginally cooler.

“Who’s the guy watching us?” asks Ronon around a mouthful of falafel.

“There’s no one watching us,” answers Rodney dismissively. “You’re just edgy because Elizabeth made you leave your knives at home.”

“He’s got hair like Beckett’s, but taller,” Ronon says, pointing over Rodney’s shoulder. “He’s carrying an ugly bag like yours and his t-shirt has a fish wearing an eye-patch.”

Rodney slaps Ronon’s hand down, eyes suddenly wide with panic. “Oh my god, hasn’t anyone told you it’s rude to point? Did he see you? Is he coming over here?”

Ronon chews for a moment, then says, “No, yes, and yes.”

“Mind if I join you?” asks Sheppard, appearing out of nowhere to stand beside their table.

Ronon grunts. Sheppard sits while Rodney’s still recovering from his attack of acute onset twelve-year-old girly-ness.

“John,” says Sheppard, sticking out a hand towards Ronon and letting his legs splay comfortably under the table so his knee bumps Rodney’s leg.

“Dex,” says Ronon, and executes some sort of weird thumb war maneuver on Sheppard’s hand, even though he knows about handshakes. Sheppard, however, seems unfazed.

“You study with Rod?” asks Sheppard. He unwraps a homemade turkey sandwich, then cracks open the plastic lid on a bottle of water.

“Mmm hmm,” says Ronon.

“You’re in botany too?” prompts Sheppard.

“I like bugs,” Ronon answers plainly, probably because he hasn’t got the slightest clue what botany even means, but again Sheppard takes the non-sequitur in stride.

“Entymology, that’s cool,” nods Sheppard. “You do any fieldwork?”

“All the time,” says Ronon, then subsides into eating again, leaving the conversational thread to Rodney.

“He’s --” says Rodney, making an apologetic face -- “sort of. Well. You know.”

Sheppard nods at this, as though this is common enough behaviour for an entymologist. And, okay, to Rodney’s best knowledge, it actually is. “You coming to class today?” Sheppard asks.

“My printer’s broken,” says Rodney. “Still.”

“I hear there are printers in the computer labs here,” Sheppard returns.

“You don’t want me there, is that it?” Rodney asks, and it comes out sounding less irritated and more plaintive than he’d intended.

Sheppard makes steady eye contact for the space of a few seconds and deliberately bumps his knee into Rodney’s. “Kinda the opposite,” he says, and does something interesting with his eyelashes and the left corner of his mouth. “You make class more interesting, to tell you the truth.”

“Good,” says Rodney, feeling weirdly stupid under Sheppard’s gaze. “Because I really need to brush up on my -- um. Homology and pentadactyl limbs. I mean…what’s that all about, anyway?”

“Come to class and you’ll find out,” says Sheppard, crumpling the plastic wrap from his sandwich in one fist before rising to his feet.

Rodney watches him stride out of the cafeteria. He’s almost forgotten about Ronon’s presence until Ronon speaks. “Does Weir know you’re trying to get into his pants?”

“I am not!” Rodney protests. Ronon just lifts an eyebrow. “Excuse me, I’m not!” Rodney shouts. “Were you paying any attention at all? Obviously, he’s trying to get into my pants!”

* * *

“How soon can you let us know?” says Elizabeth, that night on the phone.

“As soon as I find out,” returns Rodney.

* * *

But considering that Rodney’s right and that it’s totally Sheppard who’s trying to get into Rodney’s pants (and not the other way around), it’s surprisingly difficult to get any closer to Sheppard. Rodney tries his office hours, only to discover that he’s seventeenth in line for the door and that every one of the students in front of him is faking a total meltdown. He can hear the sobs through the closed door, and as entertaining as it is to envision Sheppard trying awkwardly to comfort each student in turn, Rodney’s stomach can only take so much before he concedes defeat and heads for the library.

Staying after class presents similar problems, and e-mailing Sheppard just seems too impersonal.

“Why don’t you try writing a note and slipping it to him during the lecture?” asks Ronon during lunch, the second week. He’s got a cappuccino in one fist and a bagel in the other. Rodney thinks that maybe Ronon’s adapting to college life a little too easily. He’s clearly got to rethink his conviction that Ronon and the student lifestyle are as incompatible as rational thought and, for example, evolutionary genetics.

“What exactly should I write in this note?” snipes Rodney.

“How about, ‘Do you like me like me?’” suggests Ronon, then breaks into a grin at his own cleverness. Ronon must be watching a lot of television during the day. Still, having Ronon as his sometime companion seems to have cooled Sheppard’s suspicious looks, so Rodney supposes that it’s a fair trade.

“I don’t know why he hasn’t come back to eat lunch with us,” Rodney says, a little despondently. “We eat here every day.”

Inexplicably, Ronon pulls out an iPod and starts scrolling through its playlists. “Whatever, man,” he says.

“How are you doing this?” demands Rodney, stunned.

“Doing what?”

Rodney waves a hand at the iPod. “Fitting in. Acting like you belong here.”

Ronon pops an earbud in and hits the clickwheel. “I rushed a frat last week,” he tells Rodney. “The guys are pretty cool there.”

Rodney slowly and carefully folds his arms on the table’s surface and lowers his forehead to rest on them. “I can’t believe the caveman from another galaxy is hipper than me,” he groans into the table’s surface.

“Don’t stress out about it, man,” says Ronon. “Everyone’s hipper than you.”

* * *

“After selection,” read the notes, “the frequency of A alleles becomes:

p[t]WA  
p[t]WA + q[t]WA"

“Oh my god, it’s so hideous, I can’t look away,” Rodney says out loud in the lecture, and Sheppard laughs before he catches himself.

“Yes, okay, for the mathematically inclined, this formula kind of lacks…finesse,” Sheppard concedes while the undergraduates chew on their pencils in overt confusion. “But it’s just expressing the basis of the model of haploid selection. It’s not out to win any Nobel prizes.”

Rodney nods elaborately, again chewing on the inside of his cheek, except this time he knows Sheppard’s watching him and he’s torn between wanting to take the man by the shoulders and shake the soft sciences bullshit out of him, and wanting to fist his hands in Sheppard’s spiky tall hair and molest him right there on the lab bench.

“Let’s talk through the math,” says Sheppard, finally looking away. “I don’t want anybody freaking out during office hours tomorrow, so tell me now if you get lost.”

But Rodney saw the glint of humor in Sheppard’s eyes when Rodney spoke; he saw the flicker of interest there. It’s taken two weeks of intellectually-numbing lectures, but finally Rodney is beginning to think that maybe Weir was on the right track about Sheppard after all: he’s far more than just a pretty zoologist.

* * *

“Your first PhD was in aeronautical engineering?” Rodney says after the lecture’s over, because really, he sucks at being subtle.

Sheppard actually looks left and right and ducks his head, as though Rodney has just accused him of being a Russian spy. Luckily for Sheppard, the room’s already been cleared of math-fearing zoology undergrads, and no one’s around to be horrified by Rodney’s revelation. “You-- who have you been talking to?”

“No one. I looked up your name on JSTOR,” says Rodney. “John Evan Sheppard, right? Bachelor of Science from the Air Force Academy? Graduate work in engineering at Berkley? And then you must have resigned your commission, because I can’t see the USAF footing the bill for your second PhD. I don’t think they have much use for a pilot who can recognize linkage disequilibrium at forty paces.”

“Nope, they don’t,” says Sheppard, and snaps his textbook shut. His tone is perfectly even, his face smooth and impassive, but something in Rodney’s chest clenches abruptly. Somehow he knows that Sheppard’s deeply uncomfortable with this line of discussion. “Any questions about the lecture?” he asks, still sounding almost bored, “or are we done here?”

Rodney knows he should back down; anything else he knows about Sheppard’s past could only have come from more intrusive investigations, and he can only surmise that Sheppard would react very badly indeed if he knew that Rodney has a file on him back in his hotel room. But Rodney’s desperate to resolve this situation, to make that tiny line of tension on the side of Sheppard’s mouth go away, and he’s not thinking clearly when he steps into Sheppard’s iron-clad personal space and takes Sheppard by the wrist.

“What --” starts Sheppard, his back going rigid, and Rodney leans in and kisses the corner of Sheppard’s angry mouth.

At first Sheppard’s unresponsive, tucking his chin in and starting to pull away, but then Rodney gets his fingers in Sheppard’s shock of dark hair and tugs down, and Sheppard’s breath explodes outward with relief. Suddenly Rodney’s the one being kissed, feeling Sheppard’s long slender fingers pressing wide and hungry over his back, his jaw. For a heated moment, Sheppard gets Rodney backed up against the lab counter and Rodney’s giddily thinking that this is the kind of clichéd college experience he never got to have -- ravaged by a prof on the surface of a lab bench -- when Sheppard breaks away, panting harshly. “I’m your student,” Rodney says sadly, reading the words on Sheppard’s face.

“It’s just not -- wow.” Sheppard takes a measured step back. “This has never happened to me.” The tension’s back in his posture, settling across his shoulders and down his spine from there.

“Me neither,” says Rodney, earnestly.

“Obviously we can’t--” says Sheppard, meeting Rodney’s eyes and pressing his lips together.

Rodney wants to tell Sheppard the truth -- that he’s not really a student, and yes they can -- but he doesn’t know what the hell he’d tell Elizabeth if he did that now, so he keeps his mouth clamped shut.

“Well, not…” Sheppard continues, and his mouth quirks a little. “Not here, anyway.”

“Are you serious?” Rodney squeaks, his eyes bugging out. “Oh my god, this is ten kinds of inappropriate!”

“That’s kind of what makes it interesting,” returns Sheppard. “Look, you’re only auditing this thing anyway, you’re not in my field so there’s no way I’ll be on your supervisory committee, and we just have to make sure no one finds out.”

“Are you…” begins Rodney again, then trails off as he gets distracted by the way Sheppard’s standing -- no, leaning, leaning on the lab counter with one hip cocked and his stupid t-shirt that says ‘If I were an enzyme I’d be a DNA helicase so I could unzip your genes.’ “Okay,” says Rodney. “Yeah, okay.”

“Cool,” says Sheppard, and gives Rodney his phone number.

* * *

“Any progress?” asks Elizabeth wearily over the phone.

Rodney looks in the mirror for the tenth time and scowls at a cowlick that won’t stay down. “Actually, yes,” he tells her.

“Really? What?” Elizabeth says, surprised.

“Can’t say yet. I might have more to tell you tomorrow.” Rodney pulls at the hem of his t-shirt. “In the meantime, just contemplate this: last time I saw Ronon, he was playing hacky sack in the north quad.”

“He was what?” Elizabeth asks, her voice high-pitched.

“Gotta go,” Rodney says, and hangs up.

On his way out the door, he grabs a small object from the hotel room safe and pops it in his canvas satchel.

* * *

Sheppard lives in a tiny wartime one-storey house. The fence is peeling paint and the door sticks on its hinges when Sheppard opens it to let Rodney in, but the walk is clear and it’s warmly lit on the inside. “Uh. I brought wine,” says Rodney, and shoves the paper bag into Sheppard’s hands.

“Classy,” says Sheppard. “I was just going to hand you a beer.”

Rodney drops his satchel and follows Sheppard further into the house, noticing as he does so that Sheppard hasn’t changed his clothes yet, except that he’s lost his sneakers and socks somewhere along the way and is padding barefoot over the creaky hardwood floors. It’s weirdly enticing.

“This is…” says Rodney, then gives up the pretense of small talk. “Well, it’s a house.”

“Yep,” agrees Sheppard, digging for a corkscrew. “There’s pizza on the way.”

“Classy,” echoes Rodney, smirking.

Sheppard lifts an eyebrow and tilts his head, uncorking the wine while propping himself up on the kitchen counter. “Well, it was either pizza or, y’know, parbroiled potatoes, swiss chard, and seared veal, so --”

Rodney is startled to find that he’s back in Sheppard’s personal space and the reason Sheppard’s stopped talking is that Rodney’s mouth is in the way. Sheppard tastes like beer and he’s warm and relaxed in spite of the awkward way they’ve got a cool bottle of wine trapped between their bodies. “Sorry,” says Rodney, backing away and feeling himself blush. “You just. Look good.”

“So do you,” says Sheppard, voice a little rough. “Let me just put this down.” He twists around to set the wine bottle on the counter, and when he turns back, he’s got one hand up and cradling Rodney’s chin. “We have about thirty minutes before the pizza comes,” he says, and licks Rodney’s lower lip.

“Classy,” says Rodney, and sticks his hand down the back of Sheppard’s jeans.

* * *

Rodney had figured (not that he’s thought about it a lot or anything) since Sheppard was Air Force (once upon a time) that this would be all about orders and possession and command; and (not that Rodney’d spent much time wondering) he’d sort of expected to be okay with that because it might be kind of (really amazingly) hot not to be the one in charge for a change.

So he wasn’t exactly prepared for this: Sheppard lying shirtless on his back in the middle of the linoleum floor, hands up over his head and chin tilted back, breathing hard and letting Rodney do whatever the hell he wants with him.

Rodney thinks, though, that even if he had spent some serious time envisioning how things might go (but he didn’t) he probably would be okay with this turn of events, because holy christ on a stick, Sheppard is gorgeous. Rodney sits back on his heels, straddling Sheppard’s hips, and surveys the prospect before him while his hands fiddle with Sheppard’s belt buckle.

“Don’t fuck around here,” says Sheppard brokenly. “Come on, come on.”

“Yeah,” agrees Rodney, distantly aware that he should be making fun of Sheppard and his bossy submissiveness and the way his hair is slanting northeast, but unable to think through the haze of need. He shifts further down so he’s kneeling over Sheppard’s legs, then opens Sheppard’s fly and pulls him free. And god, Sheppard’s hot in the literal sense, and he’s already leaking because he’s been hard since Rodney pushed him down onto the floor, and Rodney’s glad he’s kind of ambidextrous because he can keep one hand on Sheppard’s cock and get the other busy unfastening his own pants -- there’s no way he can get through this without getting himself off at the same time.

They have to stop halfway through so Sheppard can kick his jeans off and Rodney winds up kneeling between Sheppard’s legs with one spit-slick finger teasing behind his balls, hoping to god that he can last long enough to make Sheppard come -- which he does, just as the doorbell rings.

“Oh, mother of --” Rodney pants, still swallowing and about three strokes away from orgasm, resting his head on Sheppard’s hipbone.

“I kind of need to go and get that,” Sheppard observes raggedly, his fingers threading through Rodney’s hair.

“Not, not yet,” grates Rodney, and comes.

Sheppard goes to pay for the pizza in his boxers and nothing else. Rodney supposes he should be appalled or maybe jealous of the pizza guy, but since he’s subsided into a puddle on the kitchen floor he figures that maybe he’ll find time to worry about Sheppard’s reputation later on.

* * *

“Get this,” says Rodney, sitting down across from Ronon. He pauses and squints. “Oh my god, did you get a tongue piercing?”

Ronon grins, flashing the silver stud at Rodney.

“Actually, it kind of suits you,” concedes Rodney. “Okay, but get this.”

“What?” asks Ronon, words blurry either from his swollen tongue or the mouthful of jello he’s just eaten.

“Sheppard has the ATA gene,” Rodney announces.

“How’d you get that stick in his mouth without him noticing?” asks Ronon, spooning more jello between his lips.

“I didn’t use a cheek scraping, you moron. There’s a much simpler way.” Rodney watches the labored way Ronon is swallowing. “Are you going to get tongue gangrene and die?”

“No, ‘s’fine,” Ronon says. “What’d you do, then?”

“I checked to see if he could activate a little piece of Ancient technology I brought along with me,” Rodney says, beaming. “That blue orb we can’t make heads or tails of? It lit right up!”

“What’d you tell him, that it was a new kind of magic 8 ball?” Ronon asks.

“What are you, a robot?” asks Rodney, gaping. “How did you learn so much pop culture in, like, three weeks?”

“One of the guys at the frat house has one,” says Ronon, shrugging.

“Anyway, he didn’t see me try it. He was -- he was sleeping.” Rodney really hadn’t anticipated how bad that might sound. He’d been far too excited by the memory of the blue orb humming and shining when Rodney’d brought it close to Sheppard last night.

A slow grin curls over Ronon’s lips. “Go McKay, you actually got in his pants!”

“You are so juvenile,” Rodney complains. “And, yes. Yes, I did.”

Ronon lifts his palm up and Rodney almost flinches before he realizes that Ronon’s not about to hit him, he’s offering Rodney a high five.

“Just think about how useful he’d be around the city,” says Rodney, deliberately ignoring Ronon’s gesture.

“I’ve always thought we could use someone around to, you know. Oil your gaskets or whatever,” Ronon concurs.

* * *

The thing about being in Sheppard’s pants is that it’s very distracting and not terribly conducive to the mission at hand. Rodney knows he has to report his findings to Elizabeth, and he keeps meaning to do it, but it seems like he’s always getting home after midnight or not at all, and by the time he wakes up bleary-eyed in the morning, he’s usually running late for class.

The other part of it, Rodney can admit to himself, is that telling Elizabeth what she wants to hear -- that yes, Sheppard is worth approaching about the Atlantis mission, and yes, he has the ATA gene -- necessarily means that Rodney must proceed with the last part of his mission. He spends an hour one afternoon rereading his initial briefing notes from Elizabeth, which had seemed boring and repetitive at the time, but which are endlessly fascinating now:

Sheppard has been approached by the military in the past with offers of contracts in the aeronautics R&D division of the USAF but he has consistently refused. It seems that Sheppard’s break with the USAF was not an easy one and there is bad blood on both sides. In my opinion, it would be extremely difficult to sway Sheppard into even considering a contract with the SGA expedition without disclosing extremely sensitive details about the expedition and the SGC project. However, given Sheppard’s credentials and our current situation with the Wraith, it seems like a task that must nonetheless be undertaken.

Rodney was supposed to check Sheppard out, see if he was all he was cracked up to be as a zoologist and as an engineer. He was supposed to gain Sheppard’s confidence and then test for the ATA gene covertly because Beckett’s gene therapy was still a total crap shoot and scientists were about ten times as useful if they carried the gene. And, last of all, Rodney was supposed to sweet talk Sheppard into coming to a meeting. As Elizabeth had said, I don’t care how you get him into that room, Dr. McKay, just get him there. Whereupon Sheppard would be presented with a non-disclosure agreement and the chance to see what this contract offer was all about.

And then Sheppard would find out that Rodney had been lying to him all this time.

That’s the part Rodney can’t quite get past.

“Seriously, either get up or stay still,” says Sheppard abruptly in a sleepy grouchy voice, breaking into Rodney’s train of thought.

“I hate your mattress, it’s not my fault,” lies Rodney, turning over onto his other side to face Sheppard. In the dim moonlight he can make out Sheppard’s tired eyes and is surprised to feel a flash of guilt. “I just. Can’t sleep,” he adds, more apologetically.

“I noticed,” says Sheppard, and wraps an arm over Rodney’s side. “I’d offer to tire you out some more but I’m too exhausted.”

“What if I tried to tire you out?” Rodney offers, pushing Sheppard flat on his back. “So you’re too deeply asleep to notice me tossing and turning?” He leans closer and kisses the sleep-hot curve of Sheppard’s neck, feeling the rasp of stubble against his nose.

“How about you just tell me what’s got you all wound up?” Sheppard bargains.

“Nothing,” answers Rodney, reaching down to palm Sheppard’s cock through his boxers. “Just -- let me.”

Sheppard opens his mouth to object, but ends up sighing instead, and lifting his hips lazily into Rodney’s hand. Rodney strips them both down and turns Sheppard onto his side before hastily slicking himself up and sliding in. They fuck sleepily and languidly until at last Sheppard pushes back hard and shudders through a slow-burning orgasm. Rodney kisses the back of Sheppard’s pointy ear and comes two strokes later. They fall asleep with Rodney still inside Sheppard, sweaty and tangled close together like vines.

* * *

“I won’t do it,” says Rodney to Elizabeth the next day.

“You won’t do what?” she asks.

“I won’t lure him into some kind of trap,” Rodney pronounces. “It’s not fair to him.”

“Haven’t you been pretending to be his student for a month and a half?” Elizabeth asks incredulously. “Rodney, you’re hardly putting all your cards on the table here. What’s really going on?”

“Yes, we need him, okay?” Rodney admits. “He’s brilliant and his work speaks for itself, and he can literally, literally, make Ancient artifacts light up in his sleep. But I can’t shake the feeling that this isn’t the way to go about getting him. If I could just -- just show him one thing before I have him sign. Nothing big, just -- I don’t know. He’s a zoologist, I could give him one of those tripedal fossils we found on MX3-212. Just so he knows that we have something that’ll interest him.”

“You know I can’t condone it,” says Elizabeth sharply.

“I just really hate the idea of getting him into that room,” says Rodney vehemently.

“Once he signs that non-disclosure agreement, he’ll thank you for it,” Elizabeth says. “This is the chance of a lifetime, you know that.”

“I know that,” says Rodney, twisting the phone cord around his finger.

“So just -- look. Next week, Thursday, seven thirty p.m. at the hotel. I’ll arrange it, just get him there. Can you do that, Dr. McKay?”

“He calls me Rod,” blurts Rodney.

“You know how much we need this,” Elizabeth simply says, and hangs up.

* * *

Ronon brings a girlfriend to lunch the next day. She’s almost six feet tall and she’s wearing a Roxy workout outfit and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Her hair is bright purple. “Hey, I’m Darian,” she says, and sits on Ronon’s lap.

“Oh my god, that’s why you got the tongue piercing,” says Rodney, immediately losing his appetite.

* * *

It takes some persuasion, since Sheppard’s the king of take-out and beer, but Rodney convinces him to come out to dinner on Thursday night. He chooses the hotel restaurant, pretending that he’s heard good things about it, and by the time they’re sitting opposite each other across a stretch of white linen, Rodney’s almost forgotten his real reason for being here.

“Is it a special occasion?” asks Sheppard, who’s still obviously confused about how he agreed to this. “Some kind of anniversary?”

“I just wanted to see if you ever wore clothes that didn’t include a printed pun of some sort,” says Rodney acerbically.

“You look real nice yourself,” Sheppard answers in a bored way, studying his menu.

They eat and laugh at Sheppard’s moronic undergrads and discuss fluid dynamics and quantitative genetics (which is less ridiculous than Rodney expected) and Sheppard eats off of Rodney’s plate twice and Rodney’s shocked to find that he doesn’t mind.

Elizabeth’s probably right, he thinks. Once Sheppard recovers from the shock of revelation, he’ll probably be all over the Atlantis proposal. In a month’s time, the two of them will be playing cards together on the Daedalus and laughing about their dinner at the hotel, how Rodney had it all planned out.

Over dessert, Rodney realizes that he’s had a bit too much wine because he’s leaning across the table and sticking his finger in Sheppard’s cheesecake and then Sheppard’s doing that thing with his eyelashes and the corner of his mouth and one of them gets the bill and the other pays for it and then they’re heading out of the restaurant with Sheppard’s hand pressing into the middle of Rodney’s lower back, like a reminder.

“Let’s get home,” says Sheppard, like his house is Rodney’s too, and Rodney’s ready to say yes when he remembers that he’s supposed to have a plan.

“Wait, there’s a meeting room over here,” Rodney says, getting Sheppard by the belt and hauling him down a corridor. “There’s never anyone in these places at this time of night, let’s just --”

“You’re kind of a pervert, aren’t you?” Sheppard says fondly, and Rodney has time for one last deep kiss before he pushes the door open and shoulders Sheppard inside.

“I’m sorry,” Rodney says, and Sheppard’s eyes go wide with shock as he registers the fact that they’re very much not alone in the room. There’s enough brass glinting around the table to make a large-caliber artillery shell. “I’m sorry,” Rodney repeats, “but just trust me, you have to listen to what they’re going to tell you.”

“Dr. McKay,” says Elizabeth, rising to her feet, “I see you’ve convinced Dr. Sheppard to meet with us tonight.”

“Dr. --” repeats Sheppard numbly, staring at Rodney.

“Just promise me you’ll listen to them and I’ll explain everything,” Rodney says in a hushed tone. “Later.”

Sheppard seems too stunned to protest as he’s guided into a chair. Rodney watches him sign the non-disclosure agreement with equal numbness, then ducks out of the room before the meeting starts, feeling sick to his stomach.

* * *

Elizabeth comes to him alone, which Rodney takes as a bad sign.

“What did he say?” says Rodney, a little panicked, sitting cross-legged on his hotel room bed.

“He didn’t say much of anything,” Elizabeth says, shaking her head. “He just listened to what we had to say. Then he asked about who you really were, thanked us for wanting to include him in this project, and left.”

“So, not ‘yes’, then,” says Rodney bitterly.

“Not a ‘no’, either,” Elizabeth warns. “He told us he’d think about it and let us know. We told him that the transport leaves in four weeks’ time and to report to the Colorado Springs base before then if he wants to join us. It gives him time to request leave from the college and find another instructor to take over his classes, if he decides to come.”

“He didn’t, uh. Mention me again?” Rodney asks, sounding pathetic even to him.

“No,” says Elizabeth in a kind voice. “No, he didn’t.”

* * *

Rodney calls three times but doesn’t leave a message. He knows Sheppard’s schedule better than his own this time, and he knows that Sheppard’s not answering because he doesn’t want to, not because he’s away from the phone.

“I’m going to stay here a while longer,” Ronon tells Rodney when they meet up on campus. “I got a scholarship through the fraternity, so I figure I might as well actually get my degree. Dr. Weir’s gonna pull some strings with immigration. She says they owe her a favor anyway.”

“You want to -- get a fake Master of Science in entymology?” asks Rodney, incredulous. “Wait, have you actually been attending lectures this whole time?”

“What else am I going to do with my time?” asks Ronon, puzzled. “Besides,” he adds, “I like bugs.”

“Do you even know what DNA is? Or a cell?” Rodney demands.

“I asked around,” Ronon nods casually. “I’m still a little unclear on the mechanisms behind chitin secretion but I figure that’s what office hours are for.”

Rodney folds his arms over his chest and stares, at a complete loss for words.

“So I was thinking of getting a tattoo,” continues Ronon, “of an Orthetrum coerulescens, you know, a dragonfly? Right here.” He pokes at his left biceps. “I think it’d look good. It was Darian’s idea.”

At least, Rodney supposes, one of them managed to find love at college.

* * *

One month passes in a haze of caffeine and misery, Rodney having returned to Colorado Springs to help Samantha Carter with a new project. No one’s heard from John Sheppard, though Rodney asks Elizabeth every day just to be sure.

“It’s a pity,” she tells Colonel Caldwell during their last briefing before the Daedalus departs. “His work in the field of evolutionary genetics could have meant a big stride forward in our battle against the Wraith. And with the ATA gene, and his engineering background, and his military training…” She trails off, looking wistful.

“He would have liked Radek,” adds Rodney, sighing. “And the north tower at sunset. And those funny mint-flavoured potato puffs.”

* * *

Rodney’s literally waiting in line for the transporter, slinging his gear over his shoulders and checking his pockets to see if he’s packed enough power bars when he hears a familiar voice.

“--Been a while since I wore BDUs,” the voice is saying in a drawl, “I forgot how tight they are in the ass.”

“We’re just glad you made it,” says Elizabeth in return, and suddenly breaking free of the melee, Rodney sees him -- John Sheppard, in BDU pants and boots, carrying a standard issue USAF duffel over his shoulder and wearing a shirt that reads ‘Mendel is my chromeboy’. He looks amazing.

“Rod,” says Sheppard, nodding at Rodney.

“John,” says Rodney, in spite of himself. His heart is racing. “I should have -- I tried to explain, but… I thought you weren’t going to come. You -- you changed your mind?”

Sheppard shrugs one shoulder. “I figured it was one of two things: either you’re a lying no-good bastard… or I really can trust you and this is going to be totally awesome.” He pauses for the space of a breath. “So,” he continues, matter of fact, “I flipped a coin. Atlantis won. You won.” And, like it’s just that easy, Sheppard leans in to kiss Rodney’s mouth.

“I won?” repeats Rodney stupidly, and then the transporter beam grabs them both.

“One question,” says Sheppard, hardly pausing to take in the fact that he’s just been beamed aboard an intergalactic cruiser, “when you tripped and fell at my feet that day, was that on purpose?”

“Absolutely,” says Rodney, because a little dishonesty in a relationship is a good and healthy thing. “Come on, I brought a pack of cards, let’s go and claim a couple of bunks.”


End file.
